11/27/2002: "The Care and Feeding of a Programmer (Part I): Developer vs. Programmer"

I've been a party to many arguments over what makes someone a "developer" vs. a "programmer." The argument usually starts off, innocently enough, with a discussion of best practices. The first person (let's call him "P1" for short), with the best of intentions, wants to share some of what he feels one needs to become a better programmer. Because he's learned the XYZ method of documenting his code, and it's always helped him create clean, organized apps, he enthusiastically shares that method. He has learned a few tricks of the trade as well, and feels that CFScript, for instance, is far superior to coding in plain vanilla CF.

Along comes the second person in this argument (let's call her P2 for short.) P2 has a completely different method of documenting her code and feels that P1's method takes too much time and is not as clear as her own, home grown system.

By this time, the discussion has attracted several new people, all vying to show what they consider their best practices. Unfortunately, rather than discuss different programming methods and what each of them might bring to the mix, they are now hooked on the qualities that separate the poor unthinking drone, typing in a stupor and doing his work by rote, with the more elegant and sophisticated creative coder. And they have developed words to describe their distinctions. These words most often are "developer" and "programmer."

What is a developer, and what is a programmer? It's funny but, as much as I love these kind of discussions (almost as much as I love making fun of them), I find that very rarely do people agree on the meanings of these terms. These conversations on best practices are helpful in exposing different techniques that may help you code cleaner and better, but the ambiguity of any descriptive labels that emerge may do more to cloud the issue than to clear it up.

The "developer vs. programmer" flame war is but a symptom of a greater problem. It's similar to the "CF is better than ASP" or "Fusebox is better than non-Fusebox" fights (and, conversely, the "Fusebox stinks" mindset) that I sometimes see cropping up on the various CF lists. This "my way or no way" attitude is really symptomatic of a closed-mindedness that I would love to see eliminated altogether in the developer communities.

Instead of making such blanket statements, we would be better off saying things like "CF is better [for me] than ASP, because ...." We could say "Fusebox works better [for me] than any other methodology because ...." And then we might be more open-minded about other aspects of programming that we could even incorporate into our tried-and-true and time-tested methods. In this climate, where web programmers are expected to know so many different languages and skills, it's more important than ever to keep growing in your knowledge and your understanding of how to program any kind of application.

Making broad, blanket statements about systems of programming inherently casts a shadow on a development community that should be more united right now, especially in the face of the economic problems the industry is experiencing. More than ever, we need to approach our profession with an open mind. Believe it or not, this could make the difference in landing (or losing) your next contract.

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I don't agree in general to the distinction between developer and programmer you gave.I think the distinction lies in the quality that is assigned to developers and programmers.A programmer is (I strongly believe that) working on a lower level than a developer. One reason for that: I have been asked by my manager how many programming languages I have learnt at university. I answered that we did not learn any languages at university. Learning them is a secondary task falling in the responsibility of every single person.And learning a language at first implies learning the most important commands and how to use them. Additionally, the usage of the IDE or scripting tools to produce a runnable is an important task. In my eyes, development is more sophisticated and implies producing maintainable, flexible code. E.g., take design patterns. BTW, when asked at which age I was able to program in language XY (where XY is in my repository), I can answer: At the age of 12, because then I started to learn programming. Learning developing started much later, about at the age of 20!

Hopefully, you understand my bad English, German would be easier for me...